AbstractThis paper describes some characteristics of the OSS development approach and identified opportunities to improve the development practices and the developed software products. This includes e.g. process elements for quality assurance and the appropriate infrastructural support for the distributed development activities and their high level of parallelism and autonomy. Whereas central maintainers and core developers seem to be necessary for all OSS projects, the depencies be tween the distributed community and these central actors should be reduced to minimize entry barriers. The aspect of requirements documentation is important for traditional software development and for the collaborative OSS approach to increase the transparency and to enable the high level of process parallelism.